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“Billy Thomas, the auto racer. The Vanderbilt syndicate hired him.”
“That’s a Curtiss he’s driving.”
“The syndicate bought three of them, so he can choose the fastest. Six thousand apiece. They really want to win. Here comes a Frenchman. Renee Chevalier.”
“Chevalier navigated that machine across the English Channel.”
Bell’s eye had already been drawn to the graceful Blériot monoplane. The single-wing craft looked light as a dragonfly. An open girder of strut work connected the cloth-covered wings to the tailpiece of rudder and elevators. Chevalier sat behind the wing, partially enclosed in a boxlike compartment that shielded him nearly to his chest. He was switching his Gnome rotary engine on and off to slow it as he landed.
“I’m buying one of those when this job is over.”
“I envy you,” said Archie. “I’d love to take a crack at flying.”
“Do it. We’ll learn together.”
“I can’t. It’s different when you’re married.”
“What are you talking about? Lillian wouldn’t mind. She drives race cars. In fact she’ll want one, too.”
“Things are changing,” Archie said gravely.
“What do you mean?”
Archie glanced around and lowered his voice. “We haven’t wanted to tell anyone until we’re sure everything’s O.K. But I’m not about to start a dangerous new hobby now that it looks like we’re going to have children.”
Isaac Bell grabbed Archie underneath the arms and lifted him joyfully off the ground. “Wonderful! Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” said Archie. “You can put me down now.” People were staring. It was not often they saw a tall man raise another high in the air and shake him like a terrier.
Isaac Bell was beside himself with happiness. “Wait ’til Marion hears! She’ll be so happy for you. What are you going to name it?”
“We’ll wait ’til we see what sort of ‘it’ it is.”
“You can get a flying machine soon as it’s in school. By then flying will be even less dangerous than it is now.”
Another machine was approaching the grass.
“Who’s driving that blue Farman?”
The Farman, another French-built airship, was a single-propeller pusher biplane. It looked extremely stable, descending as steadily as if it were gliding down a track.
“Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin.”
“He could be a winner. He’s won all of England’s cross-country races, flying the best machines.”
“Poor as a church mouse,” Archie noted, “but married well.”
The socially prominent Archibald Angel Abbott IV, whose ancestors included the earliest rulers of New Amsterdam, could gossip as knowledgeably about Germans, Frenchmen, and Britons as about New York blue bloods, thanks to a long honeymoon in Europe – sanctioned by Joe Van Dorn in exchange for scouting overseas branches for the agency.
“The baronet’s wife’s father is a wealthy Connecticut physician. She buys the machines and looks after him. He’s extremely shy. Look there, speaking of having a wealthy benefactor, here comes Uncle Sam’s – U.S. Army Lieutenant Chet Bass.”
“That’s the Signal Corps Wright he’s driving.”
“I knew Chet at school. When he starts in on the future of aerial bombs and torpedoes, you’ll have to shoot him to shut him up. Though he has a point. With the constant war talk in Europe, Army officers haunt the aviation meets.”
“Is that red one another Wright?” Bell asked, puzzled by an odd mix of similarities and differences. “No, it can’t be,” he said as it drew nearer. “The propeller’s in front. It’s a tractor biplane.”
“That’s the ‘workingman’s’ entry, Joe Mudd driving. It started out as a Wright, ’til it collided with an oak tree. Some labor unionists trying to improve their reputation bought the wreck and cobbled it together out of spare parts. They call it the ‘American Liberator.’”
